A review of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, 272 pages, Hogarth (February 2025)

“Here they come,” wrote Kingsley Amis of Colin Wilson’s debut book, the bold existentialist anthology, The Outsiders, “tramp, tramp, tramp—all those characters you thought were discredited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of: Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Tolstoy [and] Dostoevsky.”

This was textbook Amis. As a critic, novelist, and individual, he was a provocateur of a self-styled anti-highbrow stripe. His fellow Cambridge don in the 1960s, F.R. Leavis, is said to have called Amis a “pornographer” for his persistent low-browism, while British film critic and director Lindsay Anderson observed that Amis would “rather pose as a philistine than run the risk of being despised as an intellectual.” But Amis’s “cultivated philistinism”—his feigned ignorance of the canon and eagerness to scorn his own literary training—was more than mere schoolboy mischief. While habitually sticking his tongue out at high society, Amis was, at his best, making a literary point.

Amis’s style of criticism was colloquial, accessible, and did not require prior knowledge of literary theories or esoteric texts. As John McDermott wrote in his introduction to The Amis Collection, novelists (like the English Victorians) “trying to tell interesting stories about understandable characters in a reasonably straightforward style” were, in Amis’s view, successful. On the other hand, those—particularly the Modernists—who cultivated artistic detachment via obscurity, complexity, and other barriers to reasonable comprehension were merely fencing off their literary property or demonstrating their membership of a clique. This was just a kind of snobbery, Amis believed—the literary equivalent of accents, complicated table manners, and what-have-you.

I thought of Amis as I read We Do Not Part, a 2021 novel by South Korean author Han Kang, republished in English translation this month. In literary circles, Kang is admired and rewarded for the kind of obscurantist sophistication that Amis disdained. She was last year’s Nobel laureate, but she first drew international acclaim with the publication of her 2015 novel, The Vegetarian, which won the Booker the following year. My misgivings about her style notwithstanding, Kang is an impressive and imaginative writer. She stretches quotidian premises to breaking point, condemning her unfortunate characters to inordinate suffering. The worlds she creates are surreally off-kilter, but they retain enough familiarity to be morbidly unsettling—The Vegetarian, for instance, is the story of a pliant woman violently shunned by her husband and family for giving up meat.